Iced Coffee, my first love

Well, other than Ralph Macchio and Don Johnson, I have loved coffee for as long as I can remember.

Whether you are brand loyal to your Dunkies or Starbucks, we can all agree that iced coffee is one of the best things about summer.

One of my favorite ways to mix it up, is to make coffee iced cubes. You can use flavored coffee or espresso. You can use old ice cube trays or even disposable muffin tins. The perk of coffee iced cubes is your drink will never be watered down. You could also try making vanilla iced cubes and turn your morning Joe into a delicious treat.

People in New Orleans swear by the cold brew method; say it’s less bitter.

The secret was in the jar: coffee concentrate made by steeping coffee grounds in cold water. It may not be as famous as jambalaya — there are no rollicking songs about coffee concentrate — but it’s part of the culinary culture of New Orleans: go to the Rue de la Course cafe and the paperback-and-sketchbook crowd is sipping iced coffee from concentrate; stand in line at a CC’s Coffee House, Louisiana’s alternative to Starbucks, and you can have a cool jolt on a day so humid that the sidewalks puddle even though it hasn’t rained. You can get store-bought concentrate like CoolBrew, N. O. Brew and French Market not just at Langenstein’s, the Uptown supermarket, but also at the local Whole Foods. And if you’re from there, you could do what my friend did and bring home a jar of concentrate from her grandmother. NYTimes

On my list to recreate this summer is a tasty, cold coffee drink I first experienced on a beach in Positano. It was called “iced coffee” but it was so much more extraordinary. Maybe it was because I was on vacation or because of the tan waiter serving it,but it was heaven in a glass. It was like an espresso slushie and it was amazing.